Sir Linksalot

• Have you heard of flipped classrooms? Last week on CNN’s Schools of Thought blog, high school Principal Greg Green explained how his entire school has implemented the flipped class structure:
  

  Teachers record their lectures using screen-capture software (we use Camtasia) and post these lecture videos to a variety of outlets, including our school website, and YouTube. Students watch these videos outside of class on their smartphone, in the school computer lab (which now has extended hours), at home or even in my office if they need to. Now, when students come to class, they’ve already learned about the material and can spend class time working on math problems, writing about the Civil War or working on a science project, with the help of their teacher whenever they need it. This model allows students to seek one-on-one help from their teacher when they have a question, and learn material in an environment that is conducive to their education.

  According to Green, this new structure is really changing the student experience: “Our attendance rate has increased, our discipline rate decreased, and, most importantly, our failure rate—the number of students failing each class—has gone down significantly.” Inside Higher Ed covered a similar style of teaching at Central Michigan University. Would this structure work in a developmental education program?  

• Innovation requires creativity. But when we’re generating new ideas, whether for curriculum design, educational delivery, or strategies for scaling up, how do we identify the good ones? “Taking a break is important,” says the research, “but make sure you do something that makes you happy, as positive moods make us even better at diagnosing the value of our creative work.” 

• How can colleges help students identify credentials with labor-market value? Our friends at Jobs for the Future got a shout-out last week in The New York Times for their Credentials that Work initiative, “which uses new technology that scrapes information from online job postings and provides real-time labor market information.”

• On Tuesday, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching hosted a webinar with updates on their developmental math work, Statway and Quantway. The presentation slides and webinar recording are available on Carnegie’s website. 

• Diego Navarro, the founder of the Academy for College Excellence, is hosting an interactive webinar on “Supporting the Students of the Future: Retention of Vulnerable & Tentative Students.” You can register now for one of two upcoming sessions: February 29th at 12:30 pm Pacific Time, or March 23rd at 11:00 am Pacific Time.

SuccessNC

Last week, the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS) was featured in the Atlantic Cities series “The Next Metro Economy.” Bruce Katz of Brookings Institution and Judith Rodin, of the Rockefeller Foundation, lifted up ten innovative efforts to shape the post(?)-recession economy, among them was the NCCCS initiative SuccessNC.

SuccessNC “is working with all 58 community colleges in the state to strengthen the college and career pathways available to North Carolina students, with the ultimate goal of doubling the number of students completing career credentials by 2020.” Katz and Rodin applaud NCCCS efforts to increase collaboration across the system, pointing to the system-wide listening tour conducted from February to October of 2010. (You can read a bit about how the tour fit into a broader state policy strategy in this Accelerating Achievement post.)

Leaders of the tour collected best practices from colleges as they went; those best practices are now housed in a searchable, online innovations database. You can search by college, by category (access, quality, success) or issue (from accreditation to developmental education to human resources and professional development.) NCCCS will continue to update the database with new promising practices from across the system.

We add our applause for NCCCS! It’s great to see DEI states receiving well-deserved national recognition for their efforts to increase student completion. What’s happening in your state that is worthy of celebration? We’d love to hear about it!

Many Happy Returns

Today’s blog birthday post is brought to you by the letter S. We look back at Accelerating Achievement posts on two of our favorite topics: scaling and state policy.

In Scaling Up, we’ve been harvesting the latest thinking on scaling from the social innovation field, calling attention to tools and resources that can help colleges and states increase the impact of developmental education advancements. We’ve also highlight stories of colleges and states that have found ways to expand the reach of promising practices. The Joy of Scaling launched a seven-week series on seven organizational capacities that support successful scaling of a social enterprise, represented by the acronym SCALERS: Staffing, Communicating, Alliance-building, Lobbying, Earnings Generation, Replicating Impact, and Stimulating Market Forces. MDC adapted this model from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business for use in community colleges. An ongoing series is delving deeper into the individual SCALERS, seeing how they apply to supplemental instruction, self-paced courses, and faculty engagement.

Supportive state policy is an essential component in any institutional plan to expand innovation to more students. This year’s Statewise posts have followed DEI state policy teams, coordinated by Jobs For the Future, as they work within state community college systems and legislatures to change outdated rules, funding, and incentive structures that stand in the way of innovation. Michael Collins, associate vice president of postsecondary state policy at JFF, laid out the Developmental Education Initiative State Policy strategy in a three-part series. The first segment showed how collecting the right data can inform state policy to accelerate dev ed innovation across a system. Part two detailed how states are investing resources in that innovation. The final installment, our most read Statewise post, made the case for a continuous improvement cycle focused on strengthening policy supports.

Finding ways to bring what works to more students will remain a vital concern for higher education—and for Accelerating Achievement—as colleges and states continue to face increasing enrollments, diminishing resources, and intensifying pressure to move students to credentials more quickly and efficiently.

Birthday Wish: Equal Opportunity

Today, Accelerating Achievement turns one. This week, we’re looking back at some of the year’s highlights and thinking about where the next year will take us.

There’s a lot going on in the DEI network of colleges, states, and partners. All year, we’ve been highlighting learnings from our exchanges of information and ideas in DEI Dispatches. Our What’s Up with DEI series featured the work of all fifteen colleges and six states; one week last May, we brought you daily posts from a few practitioners who work at the intersection of equity and postsecondary completion. We kicked off that week with The Ladder of Educational Opportunity, which reminded us that supporting programmatic and policy innovations can help ensure developmental education programs accomplish what they are intended to do: help students, regardless of background and level of preparation, obtain a credential or degree and put them on the path to economic stability.

As Americans, we pride ourselves on being members of a society where equal opportunity offers everyone a chance at success. But mounting evidence suggests that children born into low-income families are not likely to ever improve their economic security. In a speech last Thursday, Alan Krueger, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, illustrated the lack of social mobility in America:

Studies find that your parent’s income is a good predictor of your subsequent income. Studies that use income data averaged over longer periods of time for parents and children tend to find higher correlations between parental and children’s income. A reasonable summary is that the correlation between parents’ and their children’s income is around 0.50. This is remarkably similar to the correlation that Sir Francis Galton found between parents’ height and their children’s height over 100 years ago. This fact helps to put in context what a correlation of 0.50 implies. The chance of a person who was born to a family in the bottom 10 percent of the income distribution rising to the top 10 percent as an adult is about the same as the chance that a dad who is 5’6” tall having a son who grows up to be over 6’1” tall. It happens, but not often.

Why is it that so few low-income young people are able to advance in America? The readers of this blog know from experience that our education system, the keystone of our society’s meritocracy, has fallen on hard times. The pipeline that carries students from childhood to postsecondary education and living-wage work is leaky, damaged, and archaic. A postsecondary credential is now more vital than ever for finding work, but the majority of students who enroll at community colleges are not prepared for college-level courses. Too many students who need developmental education never progress on to a credential. Dev ed practitioners and policy-makers know that as long as our dev ed programs allow so many students to stagnate, social mobility will remain low. Promising innovations all around the country are getting more students quickly through these programs and on to credit-bearing courses, but they need to be expanded and replicated. Transforming dev ed from a barrier and a burden for underprepared students to a stepping stone toward achievement will restore a crucial rung on the ladder of opportunity.

Every birthday girl needs a network

We’re paging through our first year of Accelerating Achievement posts, pulling out some reader favorites and seeing what’s new. Today, we return to two posts from colleagues not directly associated with DEI, but from institutions that are committed to the same work. We’ve learned a lot this year from people throughout the community college sector and beyond.

Through In the News we’ve followed developmental education media coverage and spiced it up with conversation starters and a little analysis. In Take a Load Off, we recapped a great webinar from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning about the Foundation’s work on Statway and Quantway, two pathways to help take developmental math students “to and through” transferrable college math in one year. One big takeaway came from Uri Treisman:

“We need to sit back and not let the weight of history determine what we’re teaching. The weight of history plays too much of a role in these courses, more than our own best professional judgment, learning sciences, or the needs of the workforce.”

Both initiatives have made great strides in the last year; you can hear all about the progress during the Foundation’s upcoming January 24 webinar.


Innovation Highlight segments introduced colleges and states that are developing new strategies to get students through dev ed successfully. We’ve discussed learning communities, supplemental instruction, tutoring, acceleration and the data collection that undergirds any improvement.

One of the most popular posts came from Katie Hern at Chabot College. In Mobilizing Faculty toward Dramatic Curricular Change, Katie shared what she has learned about motivating individuals to take on the challenge of accelerated developmental education courses as an English instructor and lead of the California Acceleration Project. Hearing from faculty at different colleges, teaching in different disciplines and different modalities has been one of our favorite parts of this last year of blogging!

Happy Birthday, Accelerating Achievement!

This week, Accelerating Achievement turns one. According to What to Expect the First Year, we should have nail-trimming, sleep schedules, and solid foods all figured out. In addition to those milestones, we’ve had more than 100 posts ranging from explanations of how successful bridge programs work, to ways that data can be used to influence state policy, to an invitation for skeptics to change the way they think about developmental education. Forty-two of those were guest posts written by community college faculty, higher education researchers, workforce development experts, state policy leaders, and other friends from across the education sector. Over the next few days, we’re going to do some birthday reflecting, looking back at some of the year’s highlights and thinking about where the next year will take us.


Our Talking About Dev Ed section features posts that explore the varied definitions and passionate opinions that can make conversations about developmental education tricky. In What's in a Name?, we introduced some developmental education messaging tools and general advice for discussing developmental education with any audience. The tools include talking points tailored to key audiences, an economic appeal for supporting the success of underprepared students, and a way to talk about the essential coordination of institutional innovation and state policy. You can find all of these docs in the Resources section of our website under “Communications.” As we move into an election year, there will—we hope!—be more meaningful dialogue about the connections among educational success, employment security, and civil society. These resources could be useful as you participate in these conversations.


In Tales of Technical Assistance, we turned the spotlight on our DEI colleges that are making taking advantage of expert consultation to overcome barriers to expanding effective programs. One success story on the continuous improvement loop came from El Paso Community College (EPCC), as recorded in What Do Students Really Think? EPCC invited Arleen Arnsparger, consultant for the University of Texas at Austin’s Community College Leadership Program, to come to campus and lead a workshop about creating student focus groups. “We’re all getting better at making decisions by looking at institutional data and survey data, rather than just anecdotal information,” says Arleen. “Colleges have a lot of numbers to point them in the right direction, but student focus groups help them dig a little deeper into what they’re seeing in the data.” El Paso has continued to incorporate students into their decision-making process and as peer mentors. You can see a recap of their DEI progress here.

Lucky Links

It may be Friday the 13th, but here's your links equivalent of a rabbit's foot:

• Webinar fun! Boosting College Completion for a New Economy, an initiative of the Education Commission of the States, is hosting a webinar next week, looking at state legislative policy and funding trends. The event is scheduled for Wednesday, January 25 from 1-2pm ET. You can register here.
• The application period for the third wave of Next Generation Learning Challenges funding for blended learning models is open until June 8, 2012. There are two separate requests for proposals, one directed at secondary grantees (Breakthrough School Models for College Readiness) and one for postsecondary grantees (Breakthrough Models for College Completion). You can check out the details here.
• And while we’re talking about blended learning, you should check out Bill Tucker’s Ed Sector commentary on a new Fordham policy piece, The Costs of Online Learning. Tucker encourages advocates on all sides of this issue to dig deeper into the economics of online learning while they’re looking at student learning outcomes. (For more related reading, link to this Community College Resource Center brief about online delivery of developmental education.)

Happy New Links!

• The latest issue of Data Notes, Achieving the Dream’s bimonthly data newsletter, identifies early predictors of student success: “The findings indicate that, in general, students who complete 20 or more credits during the first academic year have better long-term outcomes.” Many students who do not complete 20 or more credits during their first year are enrolled in non-credit-bearing developmental education courses. As we learned from a previous issue of Data Notes, “Students who are placed into developmental education coursework are more likely to struggle academically and are at a greater risk of stopping out or dropping out of college.”
• A Hechinger Report article from last week describes Ohio’s decision to phase-out funding for remedial courses at four-year schools: “Some experts worry that this shift will discriminate against students from low-performing high schools in poor areas, pushing more students away from universities and into already-overburdened community colleges.” Is Ohio’s decision a smart way to allocate resources, or will it damage the state's pathway to educational opportunity? What do you think, readers?
• According to a recent post on Community College Spotlight, the California Community College’s Student Success Task Force is recommending that colleges encourage students to enroll in a non-credit student success course. As demonstrated by Chaffey’s program for probationary students (which we’ve featured previously), student success courses can improve student outcomes when paired with other student supports.

Guest Post: Modeling Accountability

When you’re expanding a new initiative, it can be difficult to build new responsibilities into the already complicated and busy lives of faculty. Below, Lisa Dresdner, director of the Center for Teaching & Learning at Norwalk Community College, shares her advice on how to encourage accountability.

Rarely does the dog eat homework anymore; instead, the printer is out of ink or the computer crashes. Sometimes it’s a court date or a car accident that prevents a student from handing in her homework, or a student has to take his little brother or mother to [fill in the blank] and missed class. We’ve all heard the excuses, and we all have sympathy for our students’ complex and challenging lives. However, we also insist on holding our students accountable: We have carefully laid out our expectations for assignments, participation, and attendance in our syllabi; we have offered extra help to accommodate their various needs; and we have continually emphasized the requirements for successful completion of our courses.

Interestingly, this same need for accountability occurs in adult behavior:  “I’m exhausted/overworked/overwhelmed with [fill in the project] and haven’t been able to get to [fill in your requirements].” Sound familiar? The truth is, everyone’s lives are complicated; as faculty, shouldn’t we model what we want our students to do? How then do we encourage accountability among faculty? Over the last two years of scaling up our learning communities with our DEI grant, we’ve found that three basic steps need to be taken.

Establish expectations early: Just as a syllabus establishes a contract at the beginning of a semester between the instructor and the students, a written outline of responsibilities and due dates at the beginning of a project or initiative serves as an agreement among faculty. The fulfillment of these requirements is often tied to an incentive of some type. Two elements of this agreement are key: First, the requirements should be presented both orally and in written form, allowing for discussions and questions about why the various tasks are necessary; and second, the participants should sign the sheet confirming their agreement to be responsible.

At Norwalk Community College, we have a Learning Community (LC) leadership team consisting of the dean of academic affairs, the DEI project director, and the chairs/directors of the departments pairing classes in the LCs. This team outlines the kinds of tasks we want LC faculty to complete:

• create three integrative learning assignments
• meet regularly to discuss the students and the course
• write two narratives reflecting on specific questions—an individual report mid-semester and a group report at the end of the semester.

In different semesters, we have asked faculty to attend professional development activities that connect to the type of work we are emphasizing in our LCs.

Because faculty know these tasks are requested by a team, rather than by “administration,” they are often more receptive to them. Additionally, we use the grant requirements to encourage individual responsibility; that is, we explain how grant funding requires accountability in both gathering and reporting data and other information. In a sense, the grant helps to create an accountability pathway that we are institutionalizing. We let potential instructors know their responsibilities prior to their agreeing to participate in an LC, and then we go over the “contract” again during an interactive workshop where they begin creating their assignments together. They all know that receiving their stipend is contingent on fulfilling their obligations.

Follow up and feedback: Since each responsibility comes with a due date, the project leader may need to prompt the faculty throughout the semester. A quick e-mail reminder to the whole group works well, and this can be followed – if necessary – by more personalized e-mails or phone calls to individuals who are excessively late. As requirements are met, feedback is crucial! Not only must we acknowledge fulfillment of a responsibility, but we should also comment to emphasize that the participants and their work are valued. Additionally, as the point person, you are in a position to respond to questions or challenges to help faculty navigate their role in the project and to highlight shared struggles and triumphs.

One of the advantages we’ve found is that by requiring faculty to submit their integrative learning assignments, we’ve built a bank of resources faculty can use in subsequent semesters. This shared resource generates further collaboration as instructors find ways to tweak and revise an assignment.

Celebrate: Faculty almost always like to celebrate with food and talk. The food and drink may cost a little money, but the opportunity to gather over refreshments and share their experiences is priceless. Reflecting as a group on the semester, especially with some focused questions, also provides feedback to you on the whole project. If this celebration occurs after the final reports or responsibilities are completed, you might share your analysis of the commonalities and differences you discovered. In past semesters, we have written a summary of what faculty have expressed and circulated it as a draft, asking for issues we may have missed. What faculty gain from this experience, besides camaraderie and an increased understanding of the project’s purpose and its value, is the knowledge that their voices are heard. Really, in the end, being heard and valued strengthens the accountability pathway for all of us.

Lisa Dresdner is director of the Center for Teaching & Learning at Norwalk Community College.